Sunday, December 7, 2008

Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground terrorist who was turned into a central figure in Obama’s bid for the presidency, decide to keep quite, that is, to speak no evil, during the campaign. Now that Obama, who once wrote a positive blurb for one of his books, is headed to the White House, Ayers has spoken: he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, published on Friday, Dec. 5. I’m posting the link to it here because it’s a good example of an exercise in evasion. As an example, I give you this paragraph:

"The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war."

Mind you, the Times once wrote a profile piece on Ayers entitled “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives.” Here’s the opening paragraph from that article:

“‘I don't regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn't do enough.’ Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.”

I find it eerie that this article was published on September 11, 2001. It’s quite possible that on that morning some soon-to-be murder victims -- who boarded a few airplanes that radical Muslims would hijack and crash into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon -- had that edition of the Times in hand and read Ayers’ words: “I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.”